In the midst of this coronavirus crisis, I saw an interesting news headline this morning about some individuals in Congress being dissatisfied about the contents of a bill that will counter some of the negative effects of the crisis on the economy.
However, those dissatisfied individuals said they were going to go ahead and vote for passage of the bill because time was of the essence, and they didn’t want the pursuit of a great bill to be the enemy of a bill that is “good enough.”
Waiting for “Greatness”
Any articles about “good enough” versus “great” always catch my attention.
As a 30 year veteran of product marketing, I admit to having a strained relationship with the tension between “good enough” versus “great.”
On the one hand, you have management gurus like Jim Collins who, in his book “Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t,” says:
“Good is the enemy of great. And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great. We don’t have great schools, principally because we have good schools. We don’t have great government, principally because we have good government. Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life.”
And on the other hand, you have those who, like the congressmen and women concerning the coronavirus bill, claim the opposite: that great is, in some cases, the enemy of good.
When it comes to product development and product marketing, I would side with the attitude of the congressmen and women over Jim Collins, but I would go even a step further.
I believe that great is, in most cases, the enemy of the good.
A quick story from my career to demonstrate.
In the late 90s when I was working for Motorola’s cell phone division, Motorola had built a brand reputation based on the durability of its cell phones, often engineered to so-called “MilSpecs,” meaning even tough enough for the military to use.
I caught a lot of flak inside the Japan division where I worked because I constantly harped on the fact, shown in independent research reports, that consumers had already transitioned from thinking of cell phones as GI Joe walkie-talkies, to thinking of them as fashionable personal communication devices.
I guess I was too junior at the time because my pleadings fell on deaf ears.
We delayed shipment of a perfectly functioning cell phone by about 8 weeks because the edge of the plastic on the phone would crack when dropped from 7 feet onto cement.
The Quality Assurance folks grew to dislike me as I told them, constantly, that no consumer in Japan cared about that, at all.
First of all, most drops in real situations would be from 3 to 5 feet, and second of all, if the phone didn’t crack, the consumer was more likely to think, “Phew, I’m so lucky!” rather than “Wow, look at that Motorola durability!”
So, we likely lost millions of dollars of sales waiting for that glorious day when, finally, the phone plastic didn’t crack from a 7 foot drop.
I wonder if the engineers actually cheated just a little bit to get that phone out the door. 🙂
Who Decides What’s Great?
What’s my point?
Product developers, in the pursuit of “great” or “perfect,” often do not include the “voice of the customer” in deciding what “great” means for the people who will actually buy the product.
Continual, never-ending pursuit of excellence in product development?
Absolutely yes.
However, it is common that product developers and marketers get too far out ahead of consumer expectations.
I believe it is the consumer who has the final say on what is great in a product at any particular point in time in a product’s development life cycle.
Tomorrow, I will talk about how I think this relates to a particular movement in the Pro-Life Business Industry.
Regards,
Brett
